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New Tony, Toned-Down Clubs For Dancing the Night Away

It will be 20 years next month since Studio 54 opened, and few people would dispute that now is a leaner, less glamorous time for night life in New York City and for dancing in particular. This is the era of the lounge, of sumptuous sit-down places where bottoms rarely leave fuzzy couches and the entertainment, as Leticia Roman complained on a recent Friday night, is ''all about looking beautiful and sitting there and who do you know.''

But Ms. Roman, who is 24 and grew up in the heated dance scene of the 1980's (she began going to clubs at 15), has begun to see hope: She was out at 4 A.M. on the crowded, light-spangled dance floor at Life on Bleecker Street, one of half a dozen new dance clubs that have opened recently in the city that scene-makers bemoan as not what it indisputably once was: the world's capital of dancing.

No one is calling this a comeback, but something is going on, even as the city's club owners have grown increasingly defensive in the wake of the drug indictments of the impresario Peter Gatien, the Giuliani administration's crackdown on illegal night life -- anything from unlicensed clubs to rowdy behavior -- and recent laws that have made it difficult to open dance clubs in new spaces.

A new, more modest generation of clubs is here: smaller, for the most part, than remaining classics like the Roxy, the Palladium and the Tunnel, they are a conscious effort to meld the mellow mood of lounges with the excitement of dancing.

And in a city where the premier dance palaces of the 70's and 80's were monuments to counter- (and often gay male) culture, they are striving for mainstream respectability. The emphasis is on what club owners like to call ''class,'' and while some snicker that is just a code word meaning worried white people with money, more say it reflects a real attempt to separate this industry of the night from its association with drugs and violence.

''I never call it a nightclub because the connotation of a nightclub in the 90's is terrible,'' said Natalie Brody, the owner of Decade, a new dance club at East 60th and First Avenue. Then she got a little vague: ''I call it a concept. I call it a state of mind, a spirit.''

What Decade is, translated from club-speak, is a souped-up supper club for people over 30, mostly affluent, for whom a 4,000-bottle wine cellar, a big cigar and no music recorded after 1979 go perfectly with dancing until nearly dawn.

There are clubs for younger people, too: Opera, which opened in October, offers dancing in a vaguely baronial setting on West 21st Street. Life, created with a $12 million renovation in the old Village Gate space, is bigger, with a capacity of just over 1,100, and with more of the old theatrics (two beautiful, very tall Russian identical twins work one bar). Aiming at a mid-20's Wall Street crowd, the Fat Boy Saloon on West 14th opened this month, offering dinner till 11 P.M., when the tables are cleared for dancing on two floors.

The only new club on the grand old scale -- of about 3,000 people -- is the latest incarnation of the Sound Factory on West 46th Street, which opened earlier this month.

Several other, comparatively small clubs are in the works, including one planned by Ingrid Casares, owner of the celebrity-encrusted Miami club, Liquid.

''It's not as overwhelming,'' Melissa Gelade, 24, who works at an advertising agency, said on a recent Friday at Opera. ''New York is an overwhelming place and it's nice to have somewhere not so intimidating. It doesn't get as crazy.''

Whether the clubs-- with cover charges from nothing to $25 and up, and basic cocktails costing $4 to $6 -- will survive long is an open question. But their proliferation seems to belie what had become common wisdom: that it was simply too difficult, risky and expensive anymore to open new dance clubs in New York, where the scene has been dominated by large clubs and, recently, stratified by special nights devoted to gay men or lesbians, blacks or Latinos.

For their part, nightclub owners tend to blame many of their problems on Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, who has sought vigorously to enforce nightclub codes as well as stamp out illegal clubs, dancing in places without cabaret licenses and rowdy or violent behavior from people leaving night spots. Just last month, a bouncer at Esso, on West 38th Street, was shot to death, the third death associated with the club in 18 months.

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But while Mr. Giuliani has made club owners' business more difficult, the reality behind the yearslong slump in dance clubs is more complicated. Robert Bookman, one of the most successful nightclub lawyers, said the reason is largely legal: Legislation passed both in the city in 1990 and in Albany in 1994 made it much more difficult for club owners to obtain cabaret licenses, necessary if there is dancing in a club, or obtaining a liquor license over the objection of local community boards.

So opening a dance club is now much more expensive and time-consuming than opening a lounge. Opera's three owners, for example, waited 14 months for their cabaret license, even though the area is zoned for the use. Robert Shalom, who is opening a club in April called Cheetah at the site of his old club, Private Eyes, on West 21st Street, said that it might cost $150,000 to open a lounge but roughly $400,000 to open a dance club, counting legal costs, waiting time and safety features like upgraded ventilation and sprinklers required by code.

''In terms of just building spaces from scratch and having dance clubs, because the licenses are so difficult to get and it's such a difficult business to make money on -- that's why there has been so little going on in the city,'' said Michael Alt, a promoter and a partner in the lounge Spy and more recently opened Chaos. ''It's been dead for years.''

But, as ever, night life in New York is evolving into new shapes, driven by the bottom line that people still want to dance. In the case of some new clubs, including Decade and Life, they are in buildings that already had cabaret licenses, perhaps the only sure way to get one in areas that are not zoned for dance clubs.

Second, many of the clubs, including Life, Opera, Decade and Cheetah, are aimed at being a hybrid of lounge and dance club: small and subdued enough so that people can talk, like in a lounge, but still conducive to dancing. In Life, for example, the dance floor is separated from several lounge areas, with their own atmosphere, music and V.I.P. zones. ''People never stopped dancing,'' said Lee Chappell, a promoter. ''They are just doing it in smaller places now.''

Many of the newer places are also trying to cater to what they call their ''quality crowd,'' or the ''A list,'' or simply the ''fabulous'' people, a constantly changing cast of the wealthy and/or glamorous that gives a club that certain buzz -- but is also difficult to maintain. Or even define.

''Look at the industries,'' Mark Baker said, the promotional director at Life. ''The music industry is sleazy. They are fat. They guzzle. The journalists, they don't really go out much. You've got the fashion crowd, well, they look good.''

''I would define a fabulous crowd as fashion, art and entertainment,'' he said. ''You want a mixture of models, designers, celebrities, painters and people who want to be painters and all of the above. That's your filler, which you let more of in when you don't have enough of the fabulous crowd.''

Whether there is enough of that crowd to go around is a matter of dispute, as is the much larger question of whether night life can make a comeback in the current era of constraints. Recently, about 50 club owners joined together to pledge to do a better job of policing themselves, and are expected to announce initiatives to placate the Mayor and their neighbors, in the hopes that these recent clubs are not simply a passing phase, impossible to sustain.

''These are kind of like temporary fix-it measures,'' Mr. Alt said. ''These aren't the answer. This is a major city with a lot of young people with a lot of disposable cash. They want to have fun.''

''Not to have really hot, outrageous clubs,'' he added, ''it's a tragedy.''

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A version of this article appears in print on March 22, 1997, on Page 1001025 of the National edition with the headline: New Tony, Toned-Down Clubs For Dancing the Night Away. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe